Simon & Schuster Will Sell Books Through Scribd

The market for e-books got slightly bigger today with news that Simon & Schuster will use Scribd as a distribution channel.  The company will make about 5,000 titles available.  They will be in a secure PDF format that can be loaded on a Sony book reader, but not Amazon's Kindle.  Scribd is one of several popular community document sites where users upload their own documents.  Simon & Schuster must see enough of a community mass to make their titles available this way.  That company and other publishers are looking to create a market for e-books before Amazon dominates it completely the way Apple does for music and players.  Amazon's strategy of a single price for all titles is right out of Apple's playbook, and one at which publishers chafe.  The Kindle is new enough as a reader, even in successive generations, to be subject to competition.  In fact, Scribd is planning an iPhone app that allows content to be read on that device.  Publishers appear to be proactive long before their counterparts in the music business in pushing alternative channels.  Kindle as a device certainly has its selling points.  It's elegant, it has a connection to the Amazon store which is part of the bundle, and it makes reading easy.  It is possible that web readers may be just as happy as reading a PDF, albeit one with restricted rights (no printing, among others) on a netbook or other device.  Simon and Schuster and the rest are probably counting on it.  [MG]